This is my submission to the via contest and i didnt made it into the top12 so I need more testing and polishing.
I need feedback on gameplay, visual gets tuned some more for next release.
[lvlshot]http://www.dr4ch.de/pics/meltdown1.jpg[/lvlshot]
[lvlshot]http://www.dr4ch.de/pics/meltdown2.jpg[/lvlshot]
[lvlshot]http://www.dr4ch.de/pics/meltdown3.jpg[/lvlshot]
[lvlshot]http://www.dr4ch.de/pics/meltdown4.jpg[/lvlshot]
download rc1
q4 - meltdown beta
Most of this is re: visuals--I just took a quick run-through and didn't have much chance to really play it.
Lighting needs a lot of work, It's a bit too dark IMO, but I also think it would look better with a bit less saturation in many places. There's just a lot of red/yellow that needs to be toned down a bit. There are also places where your light centers need re-adjusting--by this I mean that you have the centers right where the player will be walking and their shadow gets all wonky and gigantic. A good example is approaching the HB where, if you stop at the right time, you'll actually end up with your shadow darkening the entire area you can see...
Same with texturing--just in a quick run around, I noticed quite a few misaligned textures, and a lot of places were geometry would look much better with some trims and edging on stuff (e.g. edge of ramps/walkways--stuff like that).
Overall, there are many places in the level that feel very cramped to me--I think you might benefit by generally spreading stuff out here and there and making a bit more room for the player to move. If you decide that you want to try to do this, I'll come up with some specific examples if you want.
Don't get me wrong--there are things I like too.
I like the use of the liquid as a hazard, and I like the fact that there are at least two (three? more?) non-weapon-jump ways to get RG. I like the stone-floor area which serves to break up the feel of the level a bit.
Lighting needs a lot of work, It's a bit too dark IMO, but I also think it would look better with a bit less saturation in many places. There's just a lot of red/yellow that needs to be toned down a bit. There are also places where your light centers need re-adjusting--by this I mean that you have the centers right where the player will be walking and their shadow gets all wonky and gigantic. A good example is approaching the HB where, if you stop at the right time, you'll actually end up with your shadow darkening the entire area you can see...
Same with texturing--just in a quick run around, I noticed quite a few misaligned textures, and a lot of places were geometry would look much better with some trims and edging on stuff (e.g. edge of ramps/walkways--stuff like that).
Overall, there are many places in the level that feel very cramped to me--I think you might benefit by generally spreading stuff out here and there and making a bit more room for the player to move. If you decide that you want to try to do this, I'll come up with some specific examples if you want.
Don't get me wrong--there are things I like too.
I like the use of the liquid as a hazard, and I like the fact that there are at least two (three? more?) non-weapon-jump ways to get RG. I like the stone-floor area which serves to break up the feel of the level a bit.I beat the internet; the end guy is hard.
Have to echo pjw on the lighting, on the default playing settings of 'low' (which is what I use atm) the map is very dark and 'flat' which makes trying to see things quite difficult.
With regards to the closeness, you might be able to help that a bit by opening up some of the blocky areas, there were one or two spots where you've use a 'rock' texture on them but create jutting hard edge shapes; you could do a bit of minimal 3pt clipping on these to cut them back and give the appearance of space. Otherwise it might mean a rebuild to space things out a bit as pjw mentioned - it's a difficult layout to just add more space to it.
The lava idea is good (was going to use that one myself but couldn't get the material to work correctly) but you do tend to fall into the trap more than you'd like because of the tightness of the map.
Depending on how you feel about this map it might be easier to rebuild rather than juryrig the map to make it bigger which is often a 'nightmare' thing to do.
With regards to the closeness, you might be able to help that a bit by opening up some of the blocky areas, there were one or two spots where you've use a 'rock' texture on them but create jutting hard edge shapes; you could do a bit of minimal 3pt clipping on these to cut them back and give the appearance of space. Otherwise it might mean a rebuild to space things out a bit as pjw mentioned - it's a difficult layout to just add more space to it.
The lava idea is good (was going to use that one myself but couldn't get the material to work correctly) but you do tend to fall into the trap more than you'd like because of the tightness of the map.
Depending on how you feel about this map it might be easier to rebuild rather than juryrig the map to make it bigger which is often a 'nightmare' thing to do.
Depending on what areas need more space I think it wont need a rebuild. You can use the lava material if you want but its not perfect, came up with a better one now and still has room for improvement.
It will be in our water-samples in one of the next xbattle releases along with some other nice liquid-materials.
It will be in our water-samples in one of the next xbattle releases along with some other nice liquid-materials.
You always pick on my textures huh ? apparently my biggest problem in mapping :/ someone got a solution, i dont think there is a tutorial on good texturing somewhere so i will have to look at some other maps.Can you give me a good example of what maps have outstanding texturing ?o'dium wrote:The texturing i nthis map REALLY hurts my head, none of it makes sense and its just all over the place?
Its not hard dude. Trim textures go on the edges of brushes, on the "trim" and bigger textures are good for walls. A constant repeating texture is not good for floors because it looks bad.
Its just common sense. You have textures that are metal boxes used on the floor, where the texture "edge" doesn't match wit hthe brush edge, making it look daft. And then to top that off, you use the same texture on the side.
Heres an example of what you tend to do on the left, and what i think you should be doing on the right (Texturing isnt perfect dh, but it shows what i mean. More trim detail, more seperate textures etc. You can see a bad example in your shot meltdown2.jpg at the bottom):
Its just common sense. You have textures that are metal boxes used on the floor, where the texture "edge" doesn't match wit hthe brush edge, making it look daft. And then to top that off, you use the same texture on the side.
Heres an example of what you tend to do on the left, and what i think you should be doing on the right (Texturing isnt perfect dh, but it shows what i mean. More trim detail, more seperate textures etc. You can see a bad example in your shot meltdown2.jpg at the bottom):
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Silicone_Milk
- Posts: 2237
- Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2005 10:49 pm
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Silicone_Milk
- Posts: 2237
- Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2005 10:49 pm
As in... cops? lol if so there's nothing they can do about it =PJenny wrote:every post recently has been changed, i've reported riddla to authoritys, he can keep piling up the evidence if he likes.Silicone_Milk wrote: uh huh. You say that about every post.
If it's the site administrators then keep in mind that Riddla is, himself, an admin of both Quake 3 and 4 discussion forums.
Btw you kinda contradict yourself. If he's the one being reported why would HE be the one piling up evidence? :icon6:
ANYWAYS
back on the subject of the actual map, I dont have Quake 4 yet :icon23:
BUT looking at the screenshots im going to have to echo previous posts and say you need to rework the textures. The lighting in the very top and very bottom shots look super saturated as well.
Sorry for not replying sooner--too much real life.Dr4ch wrote:thx for your input and i really would like to hear what you have to suggest how to open it up a bit more.
As an experiment, just to see if more space actually feels better before you spend a bunch of time on it, you might try saving off a copy and scaling the entire map up (via Selection --> Scale...). Get rid of all your entities, since they'll all be out of place or in the void afterward, and ungroup any patchmesh groups (e.g. caps etc.) so they'll just be treated as normal geometry. Just make sure there aren't any entities left, and then scale the whole thing by, say, 1.5 on X, Y, and Z. Add a single large ambient light and a player start back in and run around and see how it feels.
That should help to determine if it's worth following up or not without a whole lot of tedium.
It might even give you a starting point that would be quicker than starting with the current map, if you decide to enlarge it.
It's not a bad idea to make sure that you scale by something that will keep everything on a 1-grid. In other words, if you actually have stuff on a 1-grid now, then theoretically you could scale by a multiple of .25 and still have everything on a .25 grid...but that would make me nervous if it were my map--I really don't like having stuff below a 1-grid. Ideally, if everything now is on a 4-grid, then if you scaled by, say, 1.75, 1.75, 1.25, everything would still be on a 1-grid...